The modern equivalent to "Never meet your heroes" is "Never follow your heroes on X"
I personally lost some respect for karpathy after seeing his post on moltbook
MIT Technology Review has confirmed that posts on Moltbook were fake
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Re: MIT Technology Review has confirmed that posts on Moltbook were fake
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
> in no way a replication of human level entities. Absolutely agree. > I don’t treat my discussions with an AI as some sort of contact with an alien intelligence Why not? They're not human intelligences. Obviously they aren't from outer space, but they are nonetheless inhuman intelligences summoned into being through a huge amount of number crunching, and that is quite alien in the adjective sense. If the argument is…
> They're already far more capable than most AIs envisioned by 20th century science fiction authors. They're not conscious, autonomous agents. They're fancy scripts. HAL 9000 had more in common with a human than ChatGPT.
There is no empirical test for consciousness. It's the 21st century equivalent of angels dancing on pin heads.
Engineers, who aren't trying to play at being new age theologians, should concern themselves with what the machines can demonstrably do and not do. In Asimov's robot tales, robots interpret vague commands in the worst way possible for the sake of generating interesting stories. But today, these "scripts" as you call them, can interpret vague and obtuse instructions in generally a reasonable way. Read through claude code's outputs and you'll find it filled with stuff like "The user said they want a 'thingy' to click on, I'm going to assume the user means a button." Now I haven't read the book since I was a teenager, but HAL 9000 applies literally instructions to achieve the mission in a way that actually makes him a liability to the mission. The best take was in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, in the intro when the narrator protagonist asks if machines can have souls, then explains that it doesn't matter, what matters is what the machine can do.
Re: MIT Technology Review has confirmed that posts on Moltbook were fake
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a very odd synergy between the AI bulls who want us to believe that nothing surprising or spooky is going on so regulation isn't necessary, and the AI bears who want us to believe nothing surprising is happening and it's all just a smoke and mirrors scam.
The Baptists and the Bootleggers https://a16z.com/ai-will-save-the-world/
ah yes, definitely a non-biased source of information: a VC firm that invests in LLMs.
Re: MIT Technology Review has confirmed that posts on Moltbook were fake
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Karpathy seemed pretty awed though
He would be among those who lack "healthy inclination to skepticism" in my book. I do not doubt his brilliance. Personally, I think he is more intelligent than I am. But, I do have a distinct feeling that his enthusiasm can overwhelm his critical faculties. Still, that isn't exactly rare in our circles.
I think many serious endeavors would benefit from including a magician.
Intelligent experts fail time and again because while they are experts, they don't know a lot about lying to people.
The magician is an expert in lying to people and directing their attention to where they want it and away from where they don't.
If you have an expert telling you, "wow this is really amazing, I can't believe that they solved this impossible technical problem," then maybe get a magician in the room to see what they think about it before buying the hype.
Re: MIT Technology Review has confirmed that posts on Moltbook were fake
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lmao these guys have really been smelling their own farts a bit too much. When is Amodei coming out with a new post telling us that AGI will be here in 6 months and it will double our lifespan?
Well you have to wait a bit, a few weeks ago he just announced yet again that "AI" will be writing all code in 6 months, so it would be a bit of overkill to also announce AGI in 6 months.
Not according to that scammy, clammy sammy:
> “We basically have built AGI, or very close to it.”[1]
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2026/02/03/sam-alt...
Re: MIT Technology Review has confirmed that posts on Moltbook were fake
#96Anyone with a decent grasp of how this technology works, and a healthy inclination to skepticism, was not awed by Moltbook. Putting aside how incredibly easy it is to set up an agent, or several, to create impressive looking discussion there, simply by putting the right story hooks in their prompts. The whole thing is a security nightmare. People are setting agents up, giving them access to secrets, payment details,…
> Anyone with a decent grasp of how this technology works, and a healthy inclination to skepticism, was not awed by Moltbook.
NPCs are definitely tricked by the smoke and mirrors though. I don't think most people on HN actually understand how non tech people (90%+ of llms users) interact with these things, it's terrifying.
Re: MIT Technology Review has confirmed that posts on Moltbook were fake
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
This was his explanation for anyone interested: > I'm being accused of overhyping the [site everyone heard too much about today already]. People's reactions varied very widely, from "how is this interesting at all" all the way to "it's so over". > To add a few words beyond just memes in jest - obviously when you take a look at the activity, it's a lot of garbage - spams, scams, slop, the crypto people, highly concern…
> That said - we have never seen this many LLM agents (150,000 atm!) wired up via a global, persistent, agent-first scratchpad Once again LLM defenders fall back on "lots of AI" as a success metric. Is the AI useful? No, but we have a lot of it! This is like companies forcing LLM coding adoption by tracking token use. > But it's also true that we are well into uncharted territory with bleeding edge automations that w…
> Once again LLM defenders fall back on "lots of AI" as a success metric.
That's not implied by anything he said. He simply said that it was fascinating, and he's right.
Re: MIT Technology Review has confirmed that posts on Moltbook were fake
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
sorry - what do you mean by embeddings in your last sentence?
Not OP. But embeddings are the internal matrix representations of tokens that LLMs use to do their work. If tokens are the native language that humans use, embeddings are the native language that LLMs use. OP, I think, is saying that once LLMs start communicating natively without tokens is when they shed the need for humans or human-level communication. Not sure I 100% agree, because embeddings from one LLM are not (…
Yea I knew embeddings I just didn’t quite understand it in OPs context. Makes sense, thanks
Re: MIT Technology Review has confirmed that posts on Moltbook were fake
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's good to keep in mind that the agentic loop, what you're using AI tools with daily is essentially that, too. The tooling just hide the interactions and back and forth nowadays. So if you think you're getting value out of any ai tooling, you're essentially admitting a contradiction with what you're dismissing here via > a bunch of chatbots interacting with each other. Just something to think about, I don't have a…
No, because I don’t treat my discussions with an AI as some sort of contact with an alien intelligence. Which is what half the hype articles were about re Moltbook. It’s an immensely useful research tool, full stop. Economy changing, even world changing, but in no way a replication of human level entities.
I think you're misunderstanding what I was trying to convey.
The thing I thought worth to ponder was the fact that you're deriving value out of what you've identified here as "a bunch of chatbots talking with each other"
These interactions seem to be producing value, even if moltbook ultimately didn't ... At least from my perspective.
But if you think about the concept itself, it's pretty easy to imagine something pretty much exactly like it being successful. The participating LLMs will likely just have to be greenlit, without it being writable for dog-and-world.
But It'd still fundamentally fall into the same category of product, which is "just a bunch of chatbots talking with each others", which itself falls e.g. Claude code into, too. Because that's what the agentic loop is, at its core.
As an example for a potentially valuable product following the same fundamental concept: imagine an orchestrator spawning agents which then synchronize through such a system, enabling "collaboration" across multiple distributed agents. I suspect that usecase is currently too expensive, but it's fundamental approach itself would be exactly what moltbook was
Re: MIT Technology Review has confirmed that posts on Moltbook were fake
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have a link?
Here’s a (low quality) blog post from 1 Password: https://1password.com/blog/from-magic-to-malware-how-opencla... And the HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46898615 Better, earlier post from Cisco: https://blogs.cisco.com/ai/personal-ai-agents-like-openclaw-... Although, none of this is a surprise, as simonw has laid out.
(thanks, though I think you're probably replying to the wrong thread?)